August 27, 2008

the cellar door is an open throat

Lari Pittman, Untitled #4 (In the Patio), 2005

Them Again -- by Klipschutz

(with apologies to Van Morrison)

That was kind of crummy, the way they got us hooked on bottled water, with an able assist from their handmaidens in the press – oh and our vanity, misdirection, trusting natures, stupidity. Eight glasses a day, bare minimum, do not drink from the tap, those rusty pipes, spirochetes, spirogyra, cryptosporidia, the iron, zinc.

Someone can write a book about it, peeling like an onion layers of opportunism and greed, pinning tails to donkeys/elephants. By now, though, it is a fait accompli, a footnote to a footnote in the history of money. Weak-ass recycling laws are in effect – hard fought, big deal, patchwork – but the bottles by the million will be with us, decomposing, practically forever, in human years.

And how it has degraded the environment, all in the name of health and fitness, cleanliness and purity, this monument to habit-creating psychosocial engineering and herding sheep through checkout lines, up to the counter, is a kind of crummy footnote to a footnote, unforgivable.

Business Life --by Donald Illich

My haircut is a brand new business.Outside the barbershop windowonlookers hope to catchthe black strands of Samsonretiring into business life.No more collapsing columnsof poetry, attracting womenand lions who come withscissors and fangs to eat me.No more boss' bad looksor rotting sonnets in the slushpiles. My cubicle hates hippies.We drink plastic from plastic cups.

American Image -- by Sebastian Matthews

I want to be Walker Evans or Robert Frank setting up shots

in the street—renegadesin Brooks Brothers suits

with Leicas draped on their chestssnapping shots of the downtrodden,

of churches, bits of billboard, boreddebutantes at posh parties

you'd have to fast-talk your way into;or aboard an ocean liner, itching

to disembark; down in the boiler roomwaiting for the foreman to look away